This is Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s lead article for the New Year’s issue of Neue Solidarität. Although it is most immediately addressed to a German audience, the message is universal.

December 31, 2016 —There is good news: Although Germany is still largely the Valley of the Clueless—thanks to its lock-step mainstream media and the mediocrity of its politicians—our well-informed contemporaries have become aware that over the coming year, a multitude of good tendencies will sweep into Europe, and even into Germany. During 2017 it will become obvious that the strategic reorientation of the greater part of our planet will be determined by the dynamic of the New Silk Road. As a result, the focus will be on an economic new world economic order for the common weal and the conquest of underdevelopment, and not the speculators’ profit maximization.

In the course of 2017, it will become clear to the still politically-correct denizens of the Washington Consensus and the EU bureaucracy, the ignorant cadre of the Conservative Revolution, and even many non-political people, that the larger part of humankind has been on the road of creating conditions on Earth worthy of humanity for all people for a long time—explicitly as a community for a common destiny of mankind.

In the new year, China will hold two major summits, at which the theme will be the consolidation of the New Silk Road initiative, and where the outstanding attractiveness of the new economic model of win-win cooperation—which has long since become the magnet of world development—will become clear. Already this global development perspective is the largest infrastructure program in the history of the world, one in which more than 100 nations and international organizations participate, which already affects 4.4 billion people and, for the first time in at least 50 years, presents a realistic hope that the problems of hunger, poverty, treatable diseases, and the denial of education can be conquered once and for all.

In the Middle East, President Putin has brilliantly turned the situation around through Russia’s military intervention in Syria: The seemingly endless sequence of wars built upon lies since September 11th, 2001, and the support of rebels speciously called “moderate”—who were given weapons for the murder of segments of the ethnic populations in the Middle East, or for terrorist acts in Europe—were interrupted and put on a good track for termination. At the upcoming meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan at the beginning of 2017, it will be clear that opposition groups in Syria are involved in the reconstruction process, and that the major nations of the region such as Russia, China, India, Iran, and Egypt—and perhaps even former supporters of ISIS and Al-Nusra—can be integrated into a construction plan for all of Southwest Asia. Thus the program to extend the New Silk Road to the Middle East, which the Schiller Institute has been developing since 2012, can be realized in 2017.

It is true that the remaining three short weeks of Obama’s administration still represent a threat of further diplomatic “hand grenades,” as Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats from the United States has demonstrated. But Putin’s reaction, namely, to forego retaliation on the same level and instead to invite the children of U.S. diplomats to the Kremlin for Christmas celebrations, clearly shows who has the upper hand. The savvy Judo Black Belt Putin is clearly superior to the modern-day Nero Obama. Xi Jinping and Putin, who both denounce the moral decadence of the West, and instead promote the moral improvement of their peoples, are morally and practically superior to such people as British front-man George Soros and Obama by orders of magnitude, who with their campaign for the legalization of drugs increase the death rate of the population.

Both President-elect Trump and Moscow have sent many encouraging signals that they have the firm intention to establish relations between the two nations on the basis of productive cooperation. And there is hope that even German Defense Minister Ms. Ursula von der Leyen will conclude that cooperation between the United States and Russia—which in turn is strategically closely linked to China—is the prerequisite for solving most of the problems in this world.

Trump has promised to invest one trillion dollars into the modernization of U.S. infrastructure, and to make it the most modern in the world. That will not happen without a massive increase of the productivity of the American workforce. The Chinese newspaper People’s Daily has reacted with an offer under the headline, “Fixing America will require Trump to be bold, and work with China.” The article quotes from Trump’s book, Great Again: “You go to countries like China. . . and you look at their train systems and their public transport. It’s so much better. We’re like a third-world country.” The article continues self-confidently, “China is leading the world in infrastructure investment and engineering. China’s [just completed] Beipan River bridge, which connects Guizhou and Yunnan provinces, is a 4,400-feet-long cable-stayed suspension bridge that hangs 1,854 feet in the sky. That is equivalent to 200 stories, roughly the height of four Trump Towers. . .”

A high-speed railway bridge connecting Shanghai and Kunming in the mountainous province of Guizhou.

Trump wants to invest a trillion dollars in infrastructure and create jobs for the population, while China can help with the financing and has substantial knowledge concerning infrastructure. This would help to bring some of the American investments in China back into the United States for America’s benefit, and to strengthen bilateral ties. Thus the program which the Schiller Institute has proposed since 2014 for U.S. cooperation with China’s New Silk Road, can quickly be put on the agenda. Madam Fu Ying, the chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of China’s legislature, recently presented just this perspective in a speech in New York.

If Republican presidential candidate François Fillon wins the French elections in May as expected, then France will commit itself to ending the European sanctions against Russia. The Austrian government, which will take over the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in January, has announced the same thing, and a restarting of relations with Russia will also be a theme of this year’s Davos World Economic Forum, according to its managing director Philipp Rösler. If German Chancellor Angela Merkel sticks to the prolongation of the sanctions which she had cooked up at her Nov. 18 mini-summit with the defeated Obama, it will get pretty lonely around her.

In view of these tectonic changes in the strategic constellation to be expected in 2017, and further imponderables which could arise, among other things, from the trans-Atlantic banking crisis—triggered by Italy, Deutsche Bank, or another of the thousand mines in the financial system—it is more than questionable whether the EU will continue to exist in its present form, and whether Merkel can win the elections in September. The BüSo will participate in these elections with the only program which presents a real answer to the refugee crisis: Germany must participate together with Russia, China, India, Japan, and perhaps with the United States, in large-scale reconstruction programs for the Near and Middle East and for Africa. We have presented concrete plans for this in the study, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, which are already being taken up in several countries as the planning basis for a policy of reconstruction of Southwest Asia and the African continent.

Mrs. Merkel has an obvious recipe for winning the elections: all she need do is make this development perspective of the BüSo her own. She has demonstrated several times in the past that she is able to make sharp turns, even if usually in a negative direction, as in her un-thought out “energy transition”—the abandonment of nuclear energy—or in her about-face in the refugee crisis, from “We can manage it” (“Wir schaffen das”), to support for detention centers for refugees and deployment of EU special “Frontex” border-guards. She has already said that Africa will be an important theme in the next G-20 summit in Hamburg in July. For a genuine change of direction, she would have to eliminate the British influence in her government, which has become blatantly predominant recently. Whether she is capable of this, will be seen in the further careers (or not) of her Anglophile advisers Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and Christoph Heusgen.

In any case, 2017 will be the year in which many aspects of the BüSo’s policy will be implemented!

Thank you for supporting the Schiller Institute. Your contributions enable us to publish, sponsor conferences, and support other activities which are critical interventions into the policy making and cultural life of the nation and the world.